# The End of Performance Reviews By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2024-01-04 After an arbitrary 12 months, many organizations formally review employee performance. Why 12 months? Well, the earth takes 12 months to go around the Sun, and doing it more frequently is risky for the organization as it raises many structural and existential questions. In many ways, performance reviews result from labor negotiations and cultural agreements about paying people what they deserve. Otherwise, organizations innately would not perform them. What incentive does an organization have to pay employees more for the same work? Economically, it would make more sense to keep their pay the same. Organizations want to pay people as little as possible in a capitalistic model. Every performance review cycle requires organizations to pay people more. While competitors may pay more to attract top talent, they also prefer not to pay them more during each review cycle. So, they spread review cycles as far apart as possible. It just happens that the 12-month mark is the maximum amount of time workers are willing to wait for a raise. Additionally, these review processes are subjective and highly complex, so most organizations dread this time of year. They must answer questions they are entirely unprepared to answer. For example, what is fair and just? What if my manager is a harder rater than my colleague's manager? Why is my raise not proportional to that of the executives? What reasoning is there to believe that human performance is normally distributed? How can one say that one person is more valuable than another? Simply put, organizations have no answers to these questions because there are no satisfying answers within the employer-employee work model. Some models are useful, but all of them are wrong. However, some models are significantly better than others. For example, if an organization doesn't have employees, there is no need for yearly performance reviews. Instead, the freelancers are constantly being evaluated and paid fairly for the work they deliver when they deliver it. Both sides can freely choose whether the pay and the performance are aligned with their individual needs as the statements of work are executed. There is no concern about fairness or uncertainty about whether one will get a raise on an arbitrary cycle. The world is fluid and continuous. So, too, should be the relationship with the work we do, the feedback we receive, and the compensation we get for spending our limited time on earth doing something for something or someone else. Asking anything else is a disservice to humanity. #### Related Items [[Organization]] [[The Human Condition]] [[Performance]] [[Management]] [[Executives]] [[Business]] [[Freedom]] [[Existential]] [[Salary]]